are obliged to turn their attention to one member after another in a uniform series.  This mental torture is evidently the displeasure which such individuals call the dislike of monotony in their work.  Whether this theoretical view is correct, we have to determine by future studies.  In our Harvard laboratory we have now proceeded from such preparatory mass experiments to subtle investigations on a small number of persons well trained in psychological self-observation with whom the conditions of the experiment can be varied in many directions.[39]

It would seem probable that such experiments might also win psychotechnical significance.  A short series of tests which would have to be adapted to the special situations, and which for the simple wage-earner would have to be much easier than those sketched above, would allow it to be determined beforehand whether an individual will suffer from repetition in work.  Even if we abstract from arguments of social reform and consider exclusively the economic significance, it must seem important that labor which involves much repetition be performed by men and women whose mental dispositions favor an easy grasp of successive uniform impressions.  Experimentation could secure the selection of the fit workmen and the complaint of monotony would disappear.  The same selection could be useful in the opposite direction, as many economic occupations, especially in our time of automatic machines, demand a quick and often rhythmical transition from one activity to another.  It is evident that those whose natural dispositions make every mental excitement a preparation not for the identical but for the contrasting stimulation will be naturally equipped for this kind of economic tasks.

XVII

ATTENTION AND FATIGUE

The problem of monotony may lead us on to other conditions through which attention is hindered and the product of labor thereby decreased.  The psychologist naturally first thinks of external distractions of attention.  If he turns to practical studies of the actual economic life, he is often decidedly surprised to find how little regard is given to this psychophysical factor.  In industrial establishments in which the smallest disturbance in the machine is at once remedied by a mechanic in order that the greatest possible economic effect may be secured, frequently nobody takes any interest in the most destructive disturbances which unnecessarily occur in the subtlest part of the factory mechanism, namely, the attention apparatus of the laborers.  Such an interference with attention must, for instance, be recognized when the workingman, instead of devoting himself to one complex function, has to carry out secondary movements which appear to be quite easily performed and not to hinder him in his chief task.  Often his own feeling may endorse this impression.  Of course the individual differences in this direction are very great.